Dead Man Walking: searing contemporary opera is a ‘triumph’

The main character De Rocher is held back by prison guards

Michael Mayes see-saws between rage and despair as De Rocher

(Image credit: Manuel Harlan)

published 6 November 2025

“If you want to experience contemporary opera at its most compelling, harrowing and intensely delivered”, said Richard Morrison in The Times, go and see English National Opera’s “stunning” new production of Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking”. First staged in the US in 2000, and based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir about her work with prisoners on death row in Louisiana, the opera focuses on a composite character, a murderer and rapist known here as Joseph De Rocher, from his brutal crime to his execution by lethal injection. Plainly, this is not the “cheeriest way to spend three hours”. But opera proves the “perfect vehicle for a drama that deals with the very essence of morality, judgement and conscience”.

This true story was turned into a powerful, Oscar-winning film in 1995. With a libretto by Terrence McNally, the opera “packs an even bigger emotional punch”, said Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph. In this version, we witness the crime itself – the murder of a young couple as they are making love in their car late one night. Staged in lurid half-lighting, it is “the most shocking spectacle I’ve ever seen on the operatic stage”. But it serves an important dramatic purpose, making us withhold sympathy from the condemned prisoner, and question Sister Helen’s wisdom. The result is a rich work full of “moral ambiguities”, and ENO’s staging, by director Annilese Miskimmon, is a “triumph”.

From the “undulating, surging” overture onwards, Heggie demonstrates a “confident control of dramatic momentum”, said David Jays in The London Standard. He uses Southern gospel alongside “conventional hymnody and lushly orchestrated passages that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1950s Hollywood melodrama”. It’s a “masterly score”, said Clive Paget in The Guardian – propulsive and supportive by turns – faultlessly played by the ENO Orchestra under Kerem Hasan. The singing, too, is first-rate. Christine Rice “brings huge emotional reserves” to the part of Sister Helen, and sings with unforced refinement. Michael Mayes conveys power and pathos as De Rocher, see-sawing between rage and despair.